Adventures in Criticism eBook

But to my mind Mr. Stockton’s characters are
even more original than the machinery of his stories.
And in their originality they reflect not only Mr.
Stockton himself, but the race from which they and
their author spring. In fact, they seem to me
about the most genuinely American things in American
fiction. After all, when one comes to think of
it, Mrs. Lecks and Captain Horn merely illustrate that
ready adaptation of Anglo-Saxon pluck and businesslike
common sense to savage and unusual circumstances which
has been the real secret of the colonization of the
North American Continent. Captain Horn’s
discovery and winning of the treasure may differ accidentally,
but do not differ in essence, from a thousand true
tales of commercial triumph in the great Central Plain
or on the Pacific Slope. And in the heroine of
the book we recognize those very qualities and aptitudes
for which we have all learnt to admire and esteem the
American girl. They are hero and heroine, and
so of course we are presented with the better side
of a national character; but then it has been the better
side which has done the business. The bitterest
critic of things American will not deny that Mr. Stockton’s
characters are typical Americans, and could not belong
to any other nation in the world. Nor can he
deny that they combine sobriety with pluck, and businesslike
behavior with good feeling; that they are as full of
honor as of resource, and as sportsmanlike as sagacious.
That people with such characteristics should be recognizable
by us as typical Americans is a sufficient answer
to half the nonsense which is being talked just now
a propos of a recent silly contest for the America
Cup.

Nationality apart, if anyone wants a good stirring
story, Captain Horn is the story for his money.
It has loose ends, and the concluding chapter ties
up an end that might well have been left loose; but
if a better story of adventure has been written of
late I wish somebody would tell me its name.

BOW-WOW

August 26, 1893. Dauntless Anthology.

It is really very difficult to know what to say to
Mr. Maynard Leonard, editor of The Dog in British
Poetry (London: David Nutt). His case
is something the same as Archdeacon Farrar’s.
The critic who desires amendment in the Archdeacon’s
prose, and suggests that something might be done by
a study of Butler or Hume or Cobbett or Newman, is
met with the cheerful retort, “But I have studied
these writers, and admire them even more than you
do.” The position is impregnable; and the
Archdeacon is only asserting that two and two make
four when he goes on to confess that, “with the
best will in the world to profit by the criticisms
of his books, he has never profited in the least by
any of them.”

Now, Mr. Leonard has at least this much in common
with Archdeacon Farrar, that before him criticism
must sit down with folded hands. In the lightness
of his heart he accepts every fresh argument against
such and such a course as an added reason for following
it:—­